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Waffles (Two cupfuls of sweet milk)
Two cupfuls of sweet milk, three cupfuls of flour, two tablespoonfuls melted butter, a level teaspoonful salt, three eggs, half a cake of compressed, or a half cup of liquid yeast. Boil the milk and when lukewarm, add the salt and yeast and stir gradually into the flour. Beat well and let stand until light, or for some hours (if for breakfast all night). Add the melted butter, then the yolks of the eggs, one at a time, beating each one thoroughly in the batter before adding another, and lastly, add the whites beaten stiff.
This is a yeast-raised waffle batter, not a baking-powder one, so the work happens the night before and the payoff is a deeper, faintly sour flavour and a crisper shell. Two details in the original assume a 1900 kitchen: the yeast is sold by the cake and the milk is boiled.
- Half a cake of compressed yeastCompressed (fresh) yeast was sold in cakes of varying size — the familiar small cake ran about 0.6 oz — so half a cake is somewhere around 1/4 to 1/3 oz fresh, roughly a teaspoon of instant or a little more active dry. "Liquid yeast" was homemade barm or hop yeast kept in a jar; there is no modern equivalent, so use the dry or fresh measure.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured milk, specified to distinguish it from the sour milk and buttermilk many households also had on hand. Whole milk gives the best result here.
- Boiling the milkScalding raw milk was standard practice, and is usually explained as killing bacteria and knocking back enzymes that could interfere with the rise. With modern milk it is unnecessary; warm it to about 110F and proceed. Do not add yeast to hot milk.
- The overnight riseThat quantity of yeast left out all night in a warm modern kitchen will over-ferment and go sharp and slack. Either let it rise 1 to 2 hours at room temperature and then refrigerate overnight, or cut the yeast to about half a teaspoon of instant for a true all-night stand.
- Eggs last, whites last of allThe hinge of the recipe. The yolks and butter go in after fermentation so the fat does not weigh down the rise, and the stiff whites are folded in immediately before baking — beat them at the last minute, not the night before, and fold rather than stir.
- The ironAt the time this meant a hinged cast-iron waffle iron set over the range and turned by hand. On an electric iron use a medium-high setting and fill it less full than usual: a yeast batter expands hard on contact with heat and will run over the edges.
- Yield and servingPerhaps eight to ten waffles, depending on the iron. There is no sugar in the batter — these would have been served with butter and syrup, honey, or a savoury accompaniment such as creamed chicken.
Waffles came to American tables through the Dutch wafel and its long-handled cast-iron irons, held over coals and later set into the top of a cookstove. What dates this particular recipe is the leavening. By the 1890s chemical baking powder had largely taken over quick breads — but the older "raised" or "risen" waffle, set overnight with yeast, held on. The instruction to boil the milk is a fossil of the pre-pasteurisation dairy, and the alternative of "a half cup of liquid yeast" points back to the era when a household kept its own yeast alive in a crock rather than buying a foil-wrapped cake at the grocer's.